blood was drawn as they fought each other for a taste of flesh; at how, within minutes, the chicken corpse had been reduced nearly to bone, split apart and quartered around the coop by hens pecking out a manic rhythm and clucking at each other in fury if their personal circles of attrition were invaded as they hacked the last scrap from their distant kin.
I wasn’t quite so keen on eggs or chickens after that.
5
Beat
L ike many writers, my mother collected her ideas whilst walking, often on the edge of night, in a state of concentrated thoughtfulness and forgetfulness, striking out into the woods, on her own or with friends.
The valley was sometimes a cage around which she prowled. We had moved there because she did not want to bring me up in the city she had hated, had wanted a place of peace and escape, somewhere to retreat to away from the urban bubble and toil. My father, however, was still deeply embroiled in London, and was there regularly, leaving us alone in the woods, in the dark. Though he was, of course, attempting to ‘bring home the bacon’, the tight nuclear unit that she had envisaged was stressed and strained by his long tours and engagements. She kept house in the meantime, travelled to Bristol or London for readings and recordings for the BBC when she could, filling up the low times between engagements with supply work in local schools, waiting for the times of plenty when my father returned.
She instinctively, intellectually slipped the bars of the cage on these walks out into the half-light of the valley, looking for the bones of its myths and histories whilst I was looked after by Jean and Alan Lloyd or the Hortons, playing with Katy and Jessie or reading books, knowing nothing of her loneliness yet only too glad to see her when she returned. Isolation, as for many poets, was a necessity for her pen and spirit, and she took full advantage of it, though after a while it could chafe and burn.
What ghosts or gods she found slipping through mud on the dark path through Keensgrove Woods only her poems can tell and they are often potently elusive. Poems such as ‘Letter to be sent by air’ however, written to my father on a trip to America, are at least in part an expression of her occasional sense of dislocation and loss within the valley, for all that ‘… the child shouts at the sky/declares its portents’.
sometimes my head is a lightness
filled with dry grass
I spread into the sky
over seas and wide forests
to find you
how you are torn out of me
a cry not my own splits the wind
I am streaming with air
where are your limbs in this whiteness?
in the night intervals
as speech to the tongue
I am near to you
as blood to the earth
I conjure you home
To me the valley was consumed with light, as I was with her. When my father was there too, the house and the trees and the whole valley full of birds and creatures sang to the tune of their voices. Yet it is her voice that I remember most clearly from childhood, which comes back to me decades later, long before her face. As John Papworth put it:
… that voice – gentle, faintly husky, full of warmth and friendliness, and roseate with the most exquisitely delicate articulation and modulation … It sometimes seemed to me her very soul was in her voice, even when she conversed on mundane things.
She once read to me from her poetry in her Cotswold cottage and some of the lines, coupled with the luminously distinctive sound of her voice, echoed within and uplifted me for days; but I noticed that at public readings she had that same capacity quietly to rivet an audience and to transmute its attention into a silent sense of almost Elysian ecstasy.
As a young boy, almost all I ever craved in the quiet moments when I was not running through the valley, convinced that I was in charge of its light and growth and of the direction the earth span, was that voice, that attention, the ecstatic calmness that it instilled in me, whether she
I wasn’t quite so keen on eggs or chickens after that.
5
Beat
L ike many writers, my mother collected her ideas whilst walking, often on the edge of night, in a state of concentrated thoughtfulness and forgetfulness, striking out into the woods, on her own or with friends.
The valley was sometimes a cage around which she prowled. We had moved there because she did not want to bring me up in the city she had hated, had wanted a place of peace and escape, somewhere to retreat to away from the urban bubble and toil. My father, however, was still deeply embroiled in London, and was there regularly, leaving us alone in the woods, in the dark. Though he was, of course, attempting to ‘bring home the bacon’, the tight nuclear unit that she had envisaged was stressed and strained by his long tours and engagements. She kept house in the meantime, travelled to Bristol or London for readings and recordings for the BBC when she could, filling up the low times between engagements with supply work in local schools, waiting for the times of plenty when my father returned.
She instinctively, intellectually slipped the bars of the cage on these walks out into the half-light of the valley, looking for the bones of its myths and histories whilst I was looked after by Jean and Alan Lloyd or the Hortons, playing with Katy and Jessie or reading books, knowing nothing of her loneliness yet only too glad to see her when she returned. Isolation, as for many poets, was a necessity for her pen and spirit, and she took full advantage of it, though after a while it could chafe and burn.
What ghosts or gods she found slipping through mud on the dark path through Keensgrove Woods only her poems can tell and they are often potently elusive. Poems such as ‘Letter to be sent by air’ however, written to my father on a trip to America, are at least in part an expression of her occasional sense of dislocation and loss within the valley, for all that ‘… the child shouts at the sky/declares its portents’.
sometimes my head is a lightness
filled with dry grass
I spread into the sky
over seas and wide forests
to find you
how you are torn out of me
a cry not my own splits the wind
I am streaming with air
where are your limbs in this whiteness?
in the night intervals
as speech to the tongue
I am near to you
as blood to the earth
I conjure you home
To me the valley was consumed with light, as I was with her. When my father was there too, the house and the trees and the whole valley full of birds and creatures sang to the tune of their voices. Yet it is her voice that I remember most clearly from childhood, which comes back to me decades later, long before her face. As John Papworth put it:
… that voice – gentle, faintly husky, full of warmth and friendliness, and roseate with the most exquisitely delicate articulation and modulation … It sometimes seemed to me her very soul was in her voice, even when she conversed on mundane things.
She once read to me from her poetry in her Cotswold cottage and some of the lines, coupled with the luminously distinctive sound of her voice, echoed within and uplifted me for days; but I noticed that at public readings she had that same capacity quietly to rivet an audience and to transmute its attention into a silent sense of almost Elysian ecstasy.
As a young boy, almost all I ever craved in the quiet moments when I was not running through the valley, convinced that I was in charge of its light and growth and of the direction the earth span, was that voice, that attention, the ecstatic calmness that it instilled in me, whether she
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